The Order of the Blue Polo - Member 000018

First of all, I have been in the open source community since it began, and I have never seen such a strong project that grows in features and stability better than competing commercial products out there. It is not just the code and releases, it is the people and the community ONMS creates that makes the whole experience so much more than other vendors. Things like DevJam, support (both the mailing lists and commercial support), training, and this (OBP) show innovation beyond products and development into business and changing how people view this sometimes bizarre realm started by Mr Stallman.

Oh yeah, the product, one word – wow.. We have been able to integrate ONMS to things like ticketing systems, a customer facing portal application, an automated auditing system that sits co-resident with ONMS, custom scripts to gather data beyond what vendors support through SNMP, as well as built tons of custom notifications and events which allow us to explain in greater detail what is going on with a customer’s environment. The only reason we were able to do all that we have done with ONMS is the extremely well designed architecture that allows for almost unlimited possibilities for data gathering, events and notifications. Every day we are put to the test of proving that our solution is better than other NMS systems out there, and while some may have fancy feeds to show pretty colors that don’t mean much, and if you wanted to spend 5 years adding custom scripts to get close to what we have, it is our ability to quickly add features and new methods to gather data that puts us out front every time.

Currently we have 50+ customers on ONMS and have designed a system where we will update all of the appliances in the field automatically with config changes/adds daily so every deployment is exactly the same. The reason this is important is that we have made a conscious decision to add everything possible to gather data based on best practices instead of custom for every client, this allows us to fulfill our goal of never missing an alarm (if it is good for one, it is good for all!!).

While the past has proven that open source projects have been typically adopted by the geeks (of which I am one, so I can say that), ONMS has proven that with support through the mailing list or the addition of the modestly priced commercial support, open source has broken through to the enterprise (in my opinion).